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Montrealer Lance Stroll on track for Formula One debut

At an age when many of his teenaged contemporaries are just hoping they can borrow the family sedan, Montrealer Lance Stroll will spend the year piloting one of the most powerful engines on four wheels at exotic locations around the world, racing at speeds topping 360 km/h.

The 18-year-old is poised to debut in Australia next weekend as the youngest driver on the Formula One circuit and the second youngest in the history of the sport.

It will mark Canada’s return to the F1 grid for the first time since one-time champ Jacques Villeneuve last raced at that level in 2006.

To put the rookie driver’s youth in perspective:

His British-based Williams Martini Racing team had to wait until after Stroll’s October birthday for his introductory press conference. Title sponsor Martini makes vermouth, and the teen hadn’t reached the legal drinking age in England.

Stroll earned his qualifying licence for F1 before he had his licence to drive on the streets of Geneva, where he now lives with his parents. He got it late last year but, he concedes, he still has to perfect his parallel parking.

Stroll is also “still working” on finishing high school.

For now though, he’s trying to move to the front of the class in the glitzy, high-stakes world of F1.

“You always have it in the back of your mind as a dream,” says Stroll. “Now that it’s happened and I’m here, obviously it’s incredible. It’s crazy just how time flies by every year. You think you’re always so far away from being there and, before you know it, you’re here and about to go racing. It’s definitely a dream come true for me.”

This is a story of natural talent, fearlessness, a father and son’s shared passion, and money, great gobs of money. Cash is the engine that drives the sport and Stroll’s billionaire dad has lots of it. Media reports estimated that fashion entrepreneur Lawrence Stroll spent at least $40 million (all figures U.S.) to get his son into the cockpit of an F1 car.

But those within the sport say Stroll can’t be dismissed as simply the privileged product of a rich dad. They maintain that easy narrative is unfair to his potential and the success he’s already achieved.

Last season, the teen was the youngest champion of F3, the junior league of formula car racing, winning 14 of 30 races, while making the podium six other times. That championship earned Stroll his Super License, which is a ticket to F1. Two years previous, in another developmental racing series, he captured the Italian Formula 4 championship.

“The potential is there. His results have been amazing,” says Villeneuve, now a television analyst at F1 races.

“He’s super-fast. He works well with the team at setting the car and he’s well-educated. He seems to be extremely passionate as well. So all the ingredients are there, it’s for him to make a good cake out of it. He’s fortunate to have the father he’s had, it opened all the doors. But now that he’s in F1, it’s in his hands.

“I’m normally not positive with young kids coming into F1 but I’m very positive with him.”

That Stroll has ascended so rapidly perhaps shouldn’t be a surprise. His life has always been about speed.

While other kids were collecting toy cars, Stroll was winning races in real ones.

At the time, he didn’t know it would be his future. All Lance Stroll cared about was his first race that morning.

So everything was laid out perfectly in his Montreal bedroom; the suit, the helmet, whatever was required for a day behind the wheel.

Stroll was 8.

His dad, a man so passionate about motorsports he paid $27.5 million at auction for a 1967 Ferrari 275 Spyder convertible, bought Stroll his first go-kart when he was 5. Now the lad was old enough to go racing at SH Karting at St-Hilaire, just outside the city.

“I remember bits and pieces of the actual race,” says Stroll. “I remember I was not the fastest but there were a couple of crashes and I ended up winning the race. I still have the trophy in my house in Montreal.”

Hugo Mousseau was manager at the karting facility and he remembers Stroll as a kid who was shy but also fearless; he drove quickly and he learned quickly. Mousseau would become Stroll’s driving coach and mentor for the next decade.

“They were going about 70 to 90 km/h. That is pretty damn fast,” says Mousseau, recalling those early kart races.

“It’s like any sport, basically. You take young skiers who are going downhill, giant slalom or those types of races. They have to be fast and they have to have some skills or interest or they’d be scared. Lance wanted to do it. He loved doing it.

“I don’t want to lie. I didn’t recognize immediately that he had the potential to one day arrive to Formula One. You can’t really say, ‘this will be the one,’ but one thing was instinctively in him — he was a fast, fast driver.”

It was a passion he inherited.

Stroll’s father made a fortune following his own dad into the fashion industry, and Lawrence Stroll had an uncanny knack for backing winners. He first acquired the licence for Pierre Cardin children’s wear in Canada and, in the ’80s, launched Polo Ralph Lauren in Europe. At one point he invested with a partner in a virtually unknown clothing designer named Tommy Hilfiger. He then became one of the principal financiers of the Michael Kors brand.

That wealth — Forbes estimated his fortune at $2.4 billion — allowed Lawrence Stroll to pursue his love of motorsports. He collects vintage cars and has a stable that includes at least 25 Ferraris. He also imports Ferraris to sell and has raced the sleek machines himself.

Young Lance, when he wasn’t at the kart track, would watch races with his dad on TV and they would attend the Canadian Grand Prix together on Montreal’s Île Notre-Dame. Lawrence Stroll also collected motorsport-themed art and he purchased the Circuit Mont-Tremblant race-car track in the Laurentian Mountains.

Lawrence Stroll does not typically give media interviews. Those who know him say he was not the racing version of a crazed hockey dad moulding his son into a driver. But Lance certainly did grew up immersed in a race-car culture.

“He watched a lot of Formula One races and other types of racing when he was young and it’s just inside of him,” says Mousseau.

The younger Stroll has always maintained that he is the driving force behind his own career.

“I wouldn’t say (my father) pushed me because that is the wrong word,” says Stroll, who has one sister. “If I wouldn’t have wanted to do it, he wouldn’t have wanted me to do it. It’s really my choice what I’m doing. (But) we obviously share a passion. We’re big motorsports fans. It’s definitely a reason why we’re here.”

After he was introduced to karting, 9-year-old Stroll was racing throughout North America and Europe and dominating, usually against older kids. When he was 11, he was spotted and recruited by talent scouts from the famed Ferrari racing team. Stroll was signed to attend the fledgling Ferrari Driving Academy in Italy, the youngest person to join an F1 team. Ferrari believed it could use the school to develop fast drivers, the way it engineers fast cars.

At the time of the signing, Luca Baldisserri, head of the academy, called him “exceptionally talented.”

Stroll was one of six drivers at the school — the next youngest was 16 — and the only North American. When he moved there the next year to start classes, he was educated in how to speak with engineers, how to analyze the performance of a car and how to deal with media and sponsors.

There were also classes in race strategy, fitness and nutrition sessions, and access to computer programs designed to improve reflexes and peripheral vision, and to simulate races.

Stroll’s dedication produced results on the track with an F4 championship in 2014 and then a jump to F3 the next year. There were some bumps along the road, sometimes into other cars.

The 16-year-old had three accidents in one four-weekend stretch that first F4 season and was assessed a one-race penalty for rough driving. Danish driver Mikkel Jensen was miffed at having one of his race days ended by a Stroll mishap.

“I don’t understand what he is thinking,” Jensen told Autosport at the time. “He’s caused a lot of accidents already this year.”

One, at Monza, Italy, was a spectacular crash that sent his car catapulting through the air, flipping and bouncing before it came to a rest. While he was devastated at the time, he downplays that barrel roll now, saying “it was an accident. There’s been other accidents. S--- happens.”

Stroll then signed with the Williams team as a development driver at the end of that season understanding it would be a quicker path to F1. In November, he was introduced as one of two drivers for the team this season. Felipe Massa, 35, is the other.

Stroll will return to Montreal in June, this time as a driver. His family maintains a home there in Westmount — Lance’s mother, Claire-Ann Stroll, launched her own line of high-end athletic wear in Montreal in 2015 — and has another in Mont-Tremblant. Stroll said he is planning to sleep in his old bedroom the night before the race, just as he did when he was 8.

“I’ll be sleeping in that same bed and in that same room but instead of going to my first ever go-kart race, I’m going to be going to the Montreal Formula One Grand Prix,” he said. “It’s going to be amazing.”

Historically in F1 racing, it is not uncommon for aspiring racers to buy a seat in one of the cars and become what is known as a “pay driver.” The introduction of the Super License was, in part, to curtail the practice; a driver must now accumulate enough points through successes at lower levels to qualify for F1.

Still, racing is hugely expensive and money changes hands.

The terms of Stroll’s deal with Williams were not made public. But given the family’s wealth, the introduction of the 18-year-old Stroll as a driver for Williams sparked much media supposition about how much Lawrence Stroll spent to secure his son’s ride.

Autoweek suggested the senior Stroll had paid $25 million to Williams; others pegged it at $35 million. Autoweek estimates Lawrence Stroll also paid out another $15 million to finance his son’s testing program with a 2014 Williams-Mercedes car at eight different tracks around the world. The idea was to get him accustomed to both a more powerful car and the various circuits.

That outlay wouldn’t include money already spent financing his son’s dream. Lawrence bought the Prema Powerteam, which his son competed for at F3. One website guessed the price tag on those two seasons to be about $15 million.

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Apart from the very top teams, drivers are expected to bring in sponsors. It just happens that Lance Stroll’s lifelong backer is his mega-rich father so the optics are less subtle.

Canadian journalist Gerald Donaldson, who has been covering Formula One for 40 years and written a dozen books on the subject, says that although the term “pay driver” is used as a disparagement, “nearly every Formula One hero you can think of bought his way into the sport.

“The classic example is Niki Lauda, who is now the boss of the Mercedes team in Formula One. He bought his way into the sport in the early ’70s, cashing in his life insurance policy. He went on to win three championships. Another great star of the sport, Ayrton Senna, came from a wealthy Brazilian family; one of his sponsors was the Bank of Brazil.”

With lower-level teams, Donaldson says, “if they have two drivers (from which to choose) and one brings a big sponsor, they’ll pick the guy with the big sponsor even if he’s slightly less talented than the other guy.”

For the best drivers, the payoff can be astronomical. Ferrari driver Sebastian Vettel will earn $50 million in salary this season while Fernando Alonso will pick up $40 million driving for McLaren. Those sums don’t include endorsements. Some drivers earn less than $200,000.

At Stroll’s introductory press conference, the Williams team said finances had no influence on the team’s decision to hire the teen.

“Money doesn’t drive performance in the cockpit,” said Claire Williams, deputy team principal of the Williams F1 team. “You either have the talent or you don’t, and I think that Lance has proved that he’s got that talent and he’s done what he’s done in order to earn his race seat.”

Stroll, too, addressed the money question at the team’s headquarters.

“I come from money — I’m not going to deny that — but I believe I’ve earned my shot in F1 because I’ve won every championship that I’ve competed in,” he said.

He later added: “Money can’t buy wins … I could have all the money in the world and finish last and that wouldn’t put me where I am today.”

Money also doesn’t buy desire or a work ethic. While the public sees the glamorous side of the sport on Sundays, Mousseau says they don’t necessarily understand the commitment required behind the scenes.

Beyond his preparation for racing, on the days he’s not driving Stroll works out two or three times, either in the gym or outside, Mousseau says. He does physical exercise a minimum of five days a week.

Stroll usually opts for either a 10- to 15-kilometre run, often beside Lake Geneva, or a 60- to 80-kilometre bike ride in the nearby mountains. Sometimes he’ll mix in a marathon swimming session. It’s meant to increase endurance for races, which are about 305 kilometres, while work in the gym is largely to gain strength, particularly in the neck and shoulders, to stand up to the G-forces.

Stroll is five-foot-11 and weighs about 154 pounds. Size is a disadvantage in F1 because the cockpit is a tight fit and there is a maximum weight for car and driver combined. Stroll is taller than many drivers. Massa is the smallest on the circuit at five-foot-five.

The Canadian is also on a strict low-fat, restricted-sugar diet, which means eating a lot of fish and chicken and very limited red meat or bread. Treats such as French fries, ice cream and pastries are out, though Stroll is allowed one cheat meal a week. A cheeseburger with fries is a favourite.

The team also closely monitors his sleep patterns. During a year, Stroll will take between 130 and 150 flights, often across multiple time zones. Being able to perform at peak on arrival can involve sleeping at odd hours in preparation. Then there is the paperwork, filing reports on the car’s performance, and hours spent on race simulations.

Stroll also has multiple sponsor and media obligations. It helps that he switches seamlessly between English and French when dealing with international reporters. For this story, he was sent questions, and returned a voice file with answers that he recorded during a break in testing in Barcelona.

“Lance wants to be a Formula One champion,” says Mousseau. “There’s a list of what you have to do to get there and he’s been doing it for a long time.”

Formula One racing is celebrating its 50th year in Canada and François Dumontier figures the race got the perfect birthday present.

Dumontier heads the Canadian Grand Prix, and having a national driver in the June race is a promoter’s dream.

“Honestly, I was waiting for this moment for a long time,” he says. “Fans like to identify with heroes. So I can’t hide that I was pretty thrilled and happy with it. The buzz is there.”

Donaldson remembers when another native son would come to race in Montreal and it was “Villeneuve fever.” Though an F1 championship put Villeneuve in a different stratosphere, he expects similar excitement when Stroll arrives.

“I remember the pressure was enormous on Jacques,” recalls Donaldson. “He was besieged by media and by fans everywhere he went and I’m sure it’ll happen again.”

A difference, of course, is that Jacques had an established racing name. His father was the legendary Gilles Villeneuve, who was worshipped in Quebec. But in the same way that Jacques and Gilles helped spawn the next generation of Canadian drivers on various circuits, some in the sport believe Stroll’s emergence may have a similar impact.

Allen Berg, a former F1 driver from Calgary who now owns racing schools in California, says it is often the presence of a role model that encourages youngsters to aspire to a sport, the way it was for him with Gilles Villeneuve.

“I’m hoping Lance is going to open up that awareness of what can be achieved by Canadians in the international forum in motorsports,” he says.

The timing for Stroll to become a star in F1 may be perfect. Formula One, the entire operation, was purchased last year by American entertainment and communications conglomerate Liberty Media, a company hoping to engage a new generation of fans through social media and broadcast initiatives. The appearance of another teenager, especially one as telegenic and articulate as Stroll, is a significant bonus.

For that to work, Stroll will need to deliver on the track. As to whether that is possible, Villeneuve says no one can be sure; a lot will depend on how he adapts mentally to the tough racing ahead. Stroll appears to have the reflexes, vision, fearlessness and, perhaps most importantly, singlemindedness necessary to be a top driver.

“Everything is a step up and, sometimes, some drivers don’t make the step up,” Villeneuve says of Stroll’s move from F3 to F1. “The potential is there. I’m confident it will go well. But we will have to wait and see. We just don’t know.”

The Williams team is also trying to return to glory. Once dominant, it has won only one race in the last 12 seasons.

During the first week of test runs recently in Barcelona, Stroll spun out three times, including once when he crashed into a barrier, cutting the week short because of damage to the car.

That caused some ridicule of Stroll online but his teammate Massa jumped to his defence, calling the incidents “absolutely part of the game.”

“Everyone should calm down, as this was his first experience of the car,” Massa told a Brazilian publication. “The boy is only 18 years old. I’ve also been 18, I’ve been through it.”

The second week went much more smoothly with the rookie able to get in 132 laps on the last day.

As Stroll has said: “There is nothing that quite prepares you for doing Formula One other than doing Formula One.”

The sport is trending younger and there is precedent for a teenaged driver to arrive and have an impact. In 2015, Belgian-Dutch driver Max Verstappen, at 17, became the youngest driver ever in Formula One though in his rookie season he caused a crash at Monaco and took criticism from veteran drivers. In 2016, he won a race and finished on the podium seven times.

Stroll said he grew accustomed to being “the youngest in every category and moving forward very quickly.

“It’s good but it’s also tough. You don’t have so much experience all the time and you kind of always have play catch-up but it’s also great, now that I’m here at 18. I have a lot of time ahead of me. Everyone has their own way to get to F1.

“Yeah, I went though it pretty quick and I’ve always been quite young in whatever I’ve done but here I am.”

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